Anybook Online Booking

Anybook Online Booking puts your Anybook booking widget on your WordPress site. Guests choose dates, times or a service, book and pay by card without leaving your website.

The plugin is a small connector. Prices, the calendar, bookings, payments and emails all stay on Anybook, so improvements to the widget reach your site without a plugin update.

• Connect in two clicks. Click Connect to Anybook, sign in as your business’s Owner and click Allow. Anybook lets your website show the widget. No keys or passwords are copied.
• A booking page made for you. The plugin can make a “Book online” page, which Anybook uses for your guests’ email links. It stays a draft until the Owner clicks Allow on Anybook.
• A block and a shortcode. Show all your units, one unit, your appointments or one service, in your colors and with your own button wording, or an availability overview: a calendar of the weeks ahead where guests click a free day to book.
• Status at a glance. The settings page shows whether your site is allowed, where your guest page is and whether online booking is on.
• Friendly with speed plugins. The widget’s script loads only on pages that show it, in the page’s head, and asks common speed plugins to leave it alone. If the widget does not appear, exclude booking-widget.js and booking-overview.js from delaying and combining in your speed plugin.

You need an Anybook account. Anybook is a paid service; the plugin itself is free and has no locked features. See anybookapp.com for plans and prices.

The Anybook booking block

Add the Anybook booking block anywhere in the block editor. In its sidebar choose what it shows (all your units, one unit, your appointments or one service, listed from your Anybook account), its colors (your theme’s palette is offered), the wording of the booking button and two headings, and whether it opens guests’ email links. Choose Availability overview to show which days are free in the weeks ahead instead; then choose the weeks shown (2 to 26, 12 if left alone), whether prices show, which units (all of them if none is ticked) and whether appointments have one row per service or one row per team member for one service. The overview uses the colors on the plugin’s settings page. A guest who clicks a free day gets the booking widget. The editor shows a preview card; the live widget shows on the published page. A Shortcode block holding [anybook ...] can be turned into the block, keeping its choices.

Shortcode

For the classic editor and page builders, [anybook] shows the same widget with the same choices:

• show="all", show="unit", show="appointments" or show="service": what to show (all units if left out).
• unit="belle": one unit (its code in Anybook).
• service="cut": one service; services="yes" also means appointments.
• accent="#0b6e4f" and text="#1f2933": colors.
• guest_links="yes": this widget opens guests’ email links when a page has several.
• button_text="Book now", details_heading="About you", dates_text="Pick your dates": wording.

The availability overview: [anybook show="overview"], with these choices:

• weeks="12": how many weeks it shows, 2 to 26 (12 if left out).
• prices="yes": show prices.
• units="belle,kayak": only these units (their codes in Anybook, separated by commas); all units if left out.
• rows="people" service="...": one row per team member for that one service (its id or code in Anybook); otherwise one row per service.

Page builders

In Elementor, put the shortcode in a Shortcode widget; in Divi, in a Code or Text module. The plugin finds the shortcode in both, so the widget’s script loads in the page’s head and the settings page knows your booking page still holds the widget. With other page builders the widget works too, but its script loads at the end of the page; if a guest’s email link does not open the booking, put the shortcode in the page’s main content as well, or ask the builder’s support to call the anybook_page_has_widget filter.

External services

This plugin connects your website to Anybook (https://anybookapp.com), the booking service that takes your bookings and payments. Without Anybook the plugin does nothing.

Your website contacts Anybook only after an administrator or editor has done one of these things:

• When you click Connect to Anybook, your browser goes to the Anybook booking site with your website’s name and address, the address of the plugin’s settings page to come back to, a single-use check value, and the address of your booking page if you chose to make one. Anybook sends your browser back with your business’s code and name.
• When you connect or enter a business code, and when you open the plugin’s settings page, your web server asks Anybook’s public API whether your business exists and whether your website is allowed, sending your business code and your website’s address. No personal data is sent. The answer is kept for ten minutes (a failure for one minute).
• When someone edits a page with the Anybook booking block, your web server asks Anybook’s public API for your business’s units and services (sending your business code) to fill the block’s choices; the answer is kept for ten minutes.

Your visitors’ browsers contact Anybook as well:

• On pages that show the booking widget, each visitor’s browser loads the widget script from the Anybook booking site (https://site.anybookapp.com/widget/booking-widget.js), and on pages that show the availability overview its script (https://site.anybookapp.com/widget/booking-overview.js) and, once the overview shows, the script that opens the widget from it and the widget’s own script (booking-overview-open.js and booking-widget.js, from the same address). The widget loads further parts of itself, named booking-*.js, from the same address as a guest moves through it. Each of these requests sends Anybook the visitor’s IP address, browser details and the address of the page, even if they do not book. When a guest books, what they type in the booking form (such as name, email address, phone number and booking details) is sent from their browser to Anybook. For card payments the widget loads Stripe (https://stripe.com), and card details go to Stripe. The widget stores nothing in the browser.

The plugin loads remote scripts only on pages that show the widget or the availability overview, never in the WordPress admin, and only once a business is connected. They are part of the Anybook service and are the widget itself, so they are not in the plugin. They load over https from the booking site’s plain address, so changes to the widget reach your site without a plugin update.

Anybook terms of service: https://anybookapp.com/terms
Anybook privacy policy: https://anybookapp.com/privacy
Stripe terms: https://stripe.com/legal and privacy policy: https://stripe.com/privacy

The plugin adds no tracking and stores no booking, guest or payment details on your website. It suggests words for your privacy policy under Settings, Privacy.

Source code and build

The folder build/booking/ holds generated files, made from human-readable source that ships in this plugin.

• Source: blocks/booking/ is the source of everything in build/booking/, including the minified build/booking/index.js. Start with blocks/booking/index.js, edit.js, shortcode.js, editor.scss and block.json.
• Build set-up: package.json and package-lock.json, in the plugin’s main folder, list the exact tools and versions.
• Tools: Node.js 20 with npm, and @wordpress/scripts 30.27.0 (webpack and Sass), which npm ci installs.

To rebuild the block, run these two commands in the plugin’s main folder:

npm ci
npm run build

npm run build runs `wp-scripts build --webpack-src-dir=blocks --output-path=build` and writes `build/booking/`. All the plugin's other files are plain PHP and need no build. The Anybook widget scripts are not part of this plugin: see External services.